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Westland plc recently announced the formation of a wholly‐owned subsidiary company, Westland Inc. to represent Westland Group activities in the United States, Central America and the Caribbean. The company will be headquartered in the Washington DC area and will be responsible for expanding existing markets and customer support activities for the various divisions, the development of new business opportunities, and the administration of all Westland personnel in the area.

AEM will be exhibiting in Hall 4, Stand G1. The exhibit will illustrate AEM's comprehensive range of accessory repair and overhaul services for electrical, hydraulic, avionic and safety equipment. Farnborough will also be used as the official launch of AEM's Boeing 737 Landing Gear Total Support Pro‐gramme, which encompasses a complete exchange and overhaul service. Copies of Aviation Accessory News will be available on the stand.

Spraying helicopter cabin interiors has recently become a more popular job with paint shop operatives at Westland Helicopter's Yeovil factory.

ROTOR blades on modern high performance helicopters are no longer entirely made of metal. New composit blades —made partly from carbon reinforced plastics — have enabled huge advances in rotor blade design. By freeing designers from the constraints of metal construction, performance has already been improved by 40 per cent. Composite rotor blades require low maintenance, are fatigue tolerant and offer a long service life.

To keep pace with demand for its revolutionary Lynx composite main rotor blade, Westland Engineering's Composites Division installed a Wild TA10BL automatic cutting table which has enabled woven details to be cut out reliably and reproducibly in a greatly reduced timescale compared with manual cutting out.

WESTLAND Aerospace, based in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, has just begun installation of C‐PLAN computerised process planning software from CADCentre Ltd. in Cambridge. More than 250 terminals are eventually to have access to the C‐PLAN system.

THE company which is now Westland Aerospace has always been a technological leader. In the first 50 years of this century it built the world's first successful amphibious flying boat and developed the world's first fighter flying boat. In the next 25 years it was involved in construction of rocket‐powered fighter aircraft, helicopters and rocket satellite launchers. Its best‐known project of this period was probably the design and construction of the world's first successful man‐carrying hovercraft —the SRN1 — in 1959.

BEARINGS on the flight controls of the Westland Lynx which gained the World Helicopter Air Speed Record for Great Britain are retained with a Loctite retaining adhesive. This application, now common on all new Westland helicopters, removed the risk of the controls binding, simplified assembly, and reduced fitting time from 10 —15 minutes to around 2 minutes for each of approximately 200 bearings per aircraft.